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I don't know if this is an appropriate question, but: Why would a well-known site be sunset by its owner? In one word, revenue. Four years ago, when I came to

I don't know if this is an appropriate question, but: Why would a well-known site be sunset by its owner? In one word, revenue. Four years ago, when I came to Dr. Dobb's, we had close to $3 million in revenue, almost all of it from advertising. Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. A friend of mine's small business observed almost this same phenomenon. Can you elaborate why revenue has declined, even though page views have continued to grow? Is advertising fundamentally changing, and page views are no longer nearly as valuable as they once were? Or is it specifically because of Dr. Dobbs' context as a software dev news/blog site? In particular, click fraud seems to be stinging my friend's business, but I assume it's not something that simple for Dr. Dobbs. Also, apologies if this sounds stupid. I don't have a background in advertising or marketing, but I find the subject fascinating and have been trying to learn about it. EDIT: The next part addresses this: This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. What I'm asking is, in what ways has the landscape changed? EDIT 2: Thank you for Dr. Dobbs. It's been wonderful over the years, and I'm sad to see it go.

bachmeier 12y ago
I can guess as to a few reasons: - Many websites these days are designed to get you to "accidentally" click on ads if you're using a mobile device. I'm not at all surprised that advertisers are catching on to this. - Websites (CNN, I'm looking at you) that move around to trick you into clicking on ads. - Autoplay video ads that almost make ad blocking software mandatory.
airza 12y ago
Adblock is pretty ubiquitous in developer circles?
- sumedh 12y ago
  I am think that almost all people in tech would be using adblock.
  - lordelph 12y ago
    This, then, is the price of adblock?
    - flurpitude 12y ago
      Well, it seems that vendors have decided web advertising is not valuable even among user demographics that don't block ads. AdBlock may not be making all that much difference if the basic problem is that people ignore ads even when they see them. That said, there must still be some value in brand recognition. I guess it's just not as much value as vendors had previously ascribed to these ads.
    - bsg75 12y ago
      Its the price of ad models that (generically) overwhelm content and users.
  - dalke 12y ago
    I'm one of the few then. I feel so special! (To be fair, I have to click to start Flash, because I haven't updated it and Firefox says it has security holes, which helps a lot.)
    - danielweber 12y ago
      It's amazing you got downvoted for non running ad-blocking software. I've never run AdBlock or any "stop viewing ads" software. I have run NoScript and those variations, which sometimes kills ads as a side-effect.
  - javert 12y ago
    Adblock is stealing. I'm pretty sure it's not the case that "amost all" people in tech have no integrity.
    - purerandomness 12y ago
      On your commute, you're passing a McDonald's store every day. You know it's there, but you never buy food there for whatever reason. Are you stealing? I'd rather pay the site directly if they'd stop displaying ads. Several companies experiment with those kinds of revenue stream: OkCupid shows you this [1] banner encouraging you to pay 5$ if you're using an ad blocker. Reddit has the "gilding" concept. While I don't know if that pays out at the end of the day, I'd rather pay the site directly than having them to rely on distracting and sometimes malicious ads which load 3 embedded flash player objects and destroy the site's performance. By relying on ads, sites naturally introduced a terrible usability. Notice how many times you encounter a complete page reload where a simple AJAX call would have done the job better? That's because you sell a certain number of page impressions to advertisers, and the sooner they're used up, the sooner you get paid. The complete system is a mess. [1] http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png
- 300bps 12y ago
  Yeah I would never want to sell a software product to attorneys (for liability reasons) or to software engineers (for piracy reasons). When I was a computer consultant, I helped an attorney client install a software package that was specifically designed for attorneys to use. It didn't work as he had intended it to when he purchased it. So he asked for a ridiculous concession from them, was denied it so he filed a lawsuit against them. I imagine the company probably gets sued a few times per week with their litigious client base.
  - organsnyder 12y ago
    I agree that software engineers certainly have more ability to pirate software, but I doubt that the rates of piracy are any higher than with the general population. For one thing, developers tend to have fairly good salaries, so there's less financial incentive for piracy. Also, you're depriving people in your own industry of income—I certainly wouldn't appreciate it if people pirated my products. Regarding attorneys: I can't imagine that it's really that prevalent. Anyone who was that litigious would quickly gain a representation as such among the legal community.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      Some people in tech will lie directly to your face about pirating your software and not feel at all bad when they are caught in it.
      - organsnyder 12y ago
        No doubt. But I'd posit that it's probably no more prevalent among those in tech compared to the general population.
  - bbarn 12y ago
    Most developers I know buy software if they like it, or perceive it to add value to them. Stealing software, as a developer - especially if it's good, and you depend on it, makes you a massive hypocrite if you get paid to create software other people use, and I think most of us have at least one time thought "Someone's job depends on purchasing this". But you're spot on with attorneys. Worst customers I ever had was in the legal space. Not only do they get lawsuit happy, but there are a lot of attorneys out there being paid a lot of money because a very bad paper based system is still in place, and tech is not their friend.
- acveilleux 12y ago
  And it's so effective I forget it's running until I use a web browser without (like say my iPad) and realize how much ads some sites have.
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    Yes, and if everybody will do like you you'll soon find nothing interesting to read, because every free content website will end like DrDobbs.
    - findjashua 12y ago
      Disagree. I'd rather pay (a reasonable amount) for a subscription, than put up with cluttered UX.
      - testrun 12y ago
        Are you currently subscribing to a mag/journal/newspaper?
        mooreds 12y ago
        Especially of a magazine in the area of software development.
    - Yizahi 12y ago
      No, there will be left free some small percentage of useful content, maybe 00,01% or less. And personally for me, these several tens of millions of pages left will be enough. Additionally some will survive on subscriptions.
    - TheSisb2 12y ago
      No, that's not strictly true. People will always do what they enjoy whether money is attached to it, whether they'll go to jail for it, or otherwise.
    - VLM 12y ago
      In the internet era you simply don't need a multinational corporation to publish your blog post for you. They're already being published for free. You still need a trusted editor to collect and curate... but that editor certainly doesn't need the multinational corporation, not anymore. Its not 1975 and ink on paper. The future probably looks a lot like "Clojure Gazette", which is a curated edited list of links to blog posts and projects focusing on a rather small field, and THE (emphasis, "the") only human involved is a trusted editor and he gets beer money plus considerable fame out of being the editor. Reading between the lines, at Dr Dobbs a small team can pull down less than a million bucks. To a multinational megacorporation, thats hopeless, sunset it. Divided among a very small team, however, that's one heck of a lifestyle business...
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  The sad thing about ad blocking is the advertisers and website owners essentially forced me into using it. I didn't use any adblocker software until earlier this year (much to the surprise of many other developers I talk with who adopted it much earlier). While I also didn't click many ads, I figured the least I could do for all the free content I was consuming was keep the ads showing. Then the line between what used to be "real" sites and clickbait sites began to blur rapidly (see, for example, the weather channel site which is now basically a clickbait digital tabloid) and advertisements on "real" sites got really pushy in ways that would previously only be done on sketchier sites, popping open tabs I never requested, etc. I eventually hit an annoyance level where I was forced to install an adblocker just to keep using the web.
  - ericd 12y ago
    Yeah, I couldn't stand seeing all of those content marketing advertorial blocks with the photoshopped-to-be-eyecatching/vaguely disturbing pictures anymore. I finally gave in earlier this year.
  - drawkbox 12y ago
    Same here, I always liked to support sites by having ads on or buying things I like on them. But I have recently switched to ad blocking as well due to tracking and worse due to broadband caps. I refuse to fill up my 400GB Cox cap with ads except on sites that deserve it. The content and marketing industries need to lobby hard against broadband caps to limit cuts into their industries, the broadband mafia wants their cut of every download and all ads run.
- acdha 12y ago
  Certain circles but I don't install AdBlock because of the huge performance hit and because I've seen plenty of false bug reports caused by malfunctioning ad-blocking extensions. It's much easier, not to mention safer, to uninstall Flash and stop visiting sites which don't respect their audience.
  - riffraff 12y ago
    for the first part, try µblock[0], it's incredibly better than AB and ABP. [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
andrewbinstock 12y ago
During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. You can verify this by counting the number of times you've bought anything by clicking on an ad you saw on a website. Most people I've asked say 0, 1, or 2 items, with a heavy skew towards zero. For publications in markets with a large number of vendors, the pool of vendors who still see advantage in web ads (such as ads that don't expect purchases, say, as for an upcoming movie) will sustain them. But the software development tools market is small with fewer than 100 vendors, many of which don't advertise at all. So, essentially, there just was not enough advertising to keep us going.
- otoburb 12y ago
  How much would you need keep an operation like Dr. Dobb's alive, or to setup a similar type of operation? I have no experience around content generation or media management, so am curious if figures could be shared around the cost structure.
  - andrewbinstock 12y ago
    Alas, I can't share that information with you WRT Dr. Dobb's, much as I'd like to.
    - otoburb 12y ago
      I figured as much, but never hurts to ask :) Thanks very much!
- hnriot 12y ago
  advertising does more than sell things directly, brand recognition is another big purpose.
  - andrewbinstock 12y ago
    True. However, brand recognition ads occur more in the consumer space than in technical market. Especially in a market of mostly small vendors, they're trying to sell, rather than establish a perception of the brand.
fidotron 12y ago
The view I've seen chucked round a lot is that social ads (i.e. Facebook) are much more effective than almost anything except a Google ad that is on a Google search results page. This is especially the case if you're trying to build awareness of a product a viewer would have no reason to otherwise search for in the first place. This point is likely to prove very contentious thanks to a critical mass of HNers with vested interest on either side.
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  Agreed; social ads are just a more refined version of banner ads. You can push ads at your target demographic until the cows come home, but ultimately the effectiveness of that strategy will be upper bounded by that of sending Shutterfly link to somebody who just Googled "photo prints". Anecdotally, the only ads I have ever clicked and not regretted it were served up by Google.
  - kaybe 12y ago
    The ads I clicked and actually found a lot of value in were for small speciality stores on small specialized websites. The thing is, I never see most ads because I run ghostery and https everywhere (no adblock necessary, not sure which of the two does the job though). The ones I see are mostly the useful ones not served by a network.
VikingCoder 12y ago
Jeez, I'd be pretty happy with $1 million in revenue. I guess if that doesn't cover the expenses to create the kind of content that gets you $1 million in revenue, then the numbers are wrong, but I find that hard to believe.
- andrewbinstock 12y ago
  We paid our authors, columnists, and bloggers. And paid a staff of 2.5 full-time employees and a salesperson. Add benefits, insurance, rent, hosting costs, and taxes--and you're not looking at a lot of profit left over.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    That's the sad thing: you're saying that it still turns a net profit after paying all of its staff and costs, and yet that's apparently not enough to keep it running.
    - andrewbinstock 12y ago
      It will turn a minimal profit this year, but we could find no way to project a profit for next year or the year after.
      - rip747 12y ago
        Personally I would do like RailsCasts.com and ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com (now ChannelAwesome.com), two sites I frequent, did... offer pro accounts. Pro accounts could: 1) remove all advertising from the site. 2) have access to content early like drafts of upcoming articles 3) have access to revised or updates to articles 4) allow people to recommend articles the list could go on, you'll probably think of a thousand things that I couldn't since I'm not in marketing.
      - marincounty 12y ago
        At first, I was wondering why not just sell the business? Who knows, you might have tried? After thinking about it some more, since it's your baby--why take the chance of letting some with more money than taste/knowlege blow it up? I understand your decision to close it down. I hope you keep talking about the efficacy of Internet advertising--the real truth. I'll follow you on Twitter.
Morphling 12y ago
>Dr. Dobb's, we had close to $3 million in revenue, almost all of it from advertising Is that actual quote from the site? Since now it just says: "Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising" I'm just curious how they would manage to spend $3 MILLION in 4 years and how it wouldn't be profitable to run a website that was ONLY $1 million revenue. I've never even heard of the site until now, so I have no idea what they are doing, but it really seems odd that money was an issue if you are raking in millions.
- B-Con 12y ago
  It's mostly before my time, but they used to be a prominent tech journal, started in the late 70s and were fairly popular in the 90s. In my head I picture them as a small company, not just "some website". $1m in revenue doesn't make for a very large company. I'm curious how they morphed in size over time and what their expenses were.
  - Morphling 12y ago
    As I said I have no idea what they did and maybe I'm just being naive, but $1 million per year seems like plenty to keep a website online.
    - dagw 12y ago
      $1 million per year is plenty to just keep a website online. It's not that much if you also want to pay people a decent wage to produce world class content to put on the site. I'm guessing the choices they faced was between a slow multi-year slide along: cut costs->lower quality content->less viewers->less money->cut costs... and simply seeing the writing on the wall and calling it quits before they hit rock bottom. I guess a third option would be to take The New Republic route and throw out everything the current audience loved about the magazine and try to create a new, entirely different product, with the same name but focusing a potentially more profitable market. But I respecting for not wanting to go that route either.
- andrewbinstock 12y ago
e12e 12y ago
Considering the Veronica Mars movie[1] hit 5MUSD funding, I wonder what it would take for a subscriber-only Dr. Dobbs journal to hit 3M with the premier tier being a one year subscription? At 10 USD/month, that's 25 000 backers? [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project?ref=most_funded https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-... [Edit: I forgot a big thank you! I still remember reading the article on red-black trees in my teens. Took me many years to realize the significance - but we learn best by streching up, to that which is just out of reach.]

bachmeier 12y ago

I can guess as to a few reasons: - Many websites these days are designed to get you to "accidentally" click on ads if you're using a mobile device. I'm not at all surprised that advertisers are catching on to this. - Websites (CNN, I'm looking at you) that move around to trick you into clicking on ads. - Autoplay video ads that almost make ad blocking software mandatory.

airza 12y ago

Adblock is pretty ubiquitous in developer circles?

sumedh 12y ago
I am think that almost all people in tech would be using adblock.
- lordelph 12y ago
  This, then, is the price of adblock?
  - flurpitude 12y ago
    Well, it seems that vendors have decided web advertising is not valuable even among user demographics that don't block ads. AdBlock may not be making all that much difference if the basic problem is that people ignore ads even when they see them. That said, there must still be some value in brand recognition. I guess it's just not as much value as vendors had previously ascribed to these ads.
  - bsg75 12y ago
    Its the price of ad models that (generically) overwhelm content and users.
- dalke 12y ago
  I'm one of the few then. I feel so special! (To be fair, I have to click to start Flash, because I haven't updated it and Firefox says it has security holes, which helps a lot.)
  - danielweber 12y ago
    It's amazing you got downvoted for non running ad-blocking software. I've never run AdBlock or any "stop viewing ads" software. I have run NoScript and those variations, which sometimes kills ads as a side-effect.
- javert 12y ago
  Adblock is stealing. I'm pretty sure it's not the case that "amost all" people in tech have no integrity.
  - purerandomness 12y ago
    On your commute, you're passing a McDonald's store every day. You know it's there, but you never buy food there for whatever reason. Are you stealing? I'd rather pay the site directly if they'd stop displaying ads. Several companies experiment with those kinds of revenue stream: OkCupid shows you this [1] banner encouraging you to pay 5$ if you're using an ad blocker. Reddit has the "gilding" concept. While I don't know if that pays out at the end of the day, I'd rather pay the site directly than having them to rely on distracting and sometimes malicious ads which load 3 embedded flash player objects and destroy the site's performance. By relying on ads, sites naturally introduced a terrible usability. Notice how many times you encounter a complete page reload where a simple AJAX call would have done the job better? That's because you sell a certain number of page impressions to advertisers, and the sooner they're used up, the sooner you get paid. The complete system is a mess. [1] http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png http://cdn.okccdn.com/media/img/template/image.png
300bps 12y ago
Yeah I would never want to sell a software product to attorneys (for liability reasons) or to software engineers (for piracy reasons). When I was a computer consultant, I helped an attorney client install a software package that was specifically designed for attorneys to use. It didn't work as he had intended it to when he purchased it. So he asked for a ridiculous concession from them, was denied it so he filed a lawsuit against them. I imagine the company probably gets sued a few times per week with their litigious client base.
- organsnyder 12y ago
  I agree that software engineers certainly have more ability to pirate software, but I doubt that the rates of piracy are any higher than with the general population. For one thing, developers tend to have fairly good salaries, so there's less financial incentive for piracy. Also, you're depriving people in your own industry of income—I certainly wouldn't appreciate it if people pirated my products. Regarding attorneys: I can't imagine that it's really that prevalent. Anyone who was that litigious would quickly gain a representation as such among the legal community.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Some people in tech will lie directly to your face about pirating your software and not feel at all bad when they are caught in it.
    - organsnyder 12y ago
      No doubt. But I'd posit that it's probably no more prevalent among those in tech compared to the general population.
- bbarn 12y ago
  Most developers I know buy software if they like it, or perceive it to add value to them. Stealing software, as a developer - especially if it's good, and you depend on it, makes you a massive hypocrite if you get paid to create software other people use, and I think most of us have at least one time thought "Someone's job depends on purchasing this". But you're spot on with attorneys. Worst customers I ever had was in the legal space. Not only do they get lawsuit happy, but there are a lot of attorneys out there being paid a lot of money because a very bad paper based system is still in place, and tech is not their friend.
acveilleux 12y ago
And it's so effective I forget it's running until I use a web browser without (like say my iPad) and realize how much ads some sites have.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  Yes, and if everybody will do like you you'll soon find nothing interesting to read, because every free content website will end like DrDobbs.
  - findjashua 12y ago
    Disagree. I'd rather pay (a reasonable amount) for a subscription, than put up with cluttered UX.
    - testrun 12y ago
      Are you currently subscribing to a mag/journal/newspaper?
      - mooreds 12y ago
        Especially of a magazine in the area of software development.
  - Yizahi 12y ago
    No, there will be left free some small percentage of useful content, maybe 00,01% or less. And personally for me, these several tens of millions of pages left will be enough. Additionally some will survive on subscriptions.
  - TheSisb2 12y ago
    No, that's not strictly true. People will always do what they enjoy whether money is attached to it, whether they'll go to jail for it, or otherwise.
  - VLM 12y ago
    In the internet era you simply don't need a multinational corporation to publish your blog post for you. They're already being published for free. You still need a trusted editor to collect and curate... but that editor certainly doesn't need the multinational corporation, not anymore. Its not 1975 and ink on paper. The future probably looks a lot like "Clojure Gazette", which is a curated edited list of links to blog posts and projects focusing on a rather small field, and THE (emphasis, "the") only human involved is a trusted editor and he gets beer money plus considerable fame out of being the editor. Reading between the lines, at Dr Dobbs a small team can pull down less than a million bucks. To a multinational megacorporation, thats hopeless, sunset it. Divided among a very small team, however, that's one heck of a lifestyle business...
georgemcbay 12y ago
The sad thing about ad blocking is the advertisers and website owners essentially forced me into using it. I didn't use any adblocker software until earlier this year (much to the surprise of many other developers I talk with who adopted it much earlier). While I also didn't click many ads, I figured the least I could do for all the free content I was consuming was keep the ads showing. Then the line between what used to be "real" sites and clickbait sites began to blur rapidly (see, for example, the weather channel site which is now basically a clickbait digital tabloid) and advertisements on "real" sites got really pushy in ways that would previously only be done on sketchier sites, popping open tabs I never requested, etc. I eventually hit an annoyance level where I was forced to install an adblocker just to keep using the web.
- ericd 12y ago
  Yeah, I couldn't stand seeing all of those content marketing advertorial blocks with the photoshopped-to-be-eyecatching/vaguely disturbing pictures anymore. I finally gave in earlier this year.
- drawkbox 12y ago
  Same here, I always liked to support sites by having ads on or buying things I like on them. But I have recently switched to ad blocking as well due to tracking and worse due to broadband caps. I refuse to fill up my 400GB Cox cap with ads except on sites that deserve it. The content and marketing industries need to lobby hard against broadband caps to limit cuts into their industries, the broadband mafia wants their cut of every download and all ads run.
acdha 12y ago
Certain circles but I don't install AdBlock because of the huge performance hit and because I've seen plenty of false bug reports caused by malfunctioning ad-blocking extensions. It's much easier, not to mention safer, to uninstall Flash and stop visiting sites which don't respect their audience.
- riffraff 12y ago
  for the first part, try µblock[0], it's incredibly better than AB and ABP. [0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

andrewbinstock 12y ago

During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. You can verify this by counting the number of times you've bought anything by clicking on an ad you saw on a website. Most people I've asked say 0, 1, or 2 items, with a heavy skew towards zero. For publications in markets with a large number of vendors, the pool of vendors who still see advantage in web ads (such as ads that don't expect purchases, say, as for an upcoming movie) will sustain them. But the software development tools market is small with fewer than 100 vendors, many of which don't advertise at all. So, essentially, there just was not enough advertising to keep us going.

otoburb 12y ago
How much would you need keep an operation like Dr. Dobb's alive, or to setup a similar type of operation? I have no experience around content generation or media management, so am curious if figures could be shared around the cost structure.
- andrewbinstock 12y ago
  Alas, I can't share that information with you WRT Dr. Dobb's, much as I'd like to.
  - otoburb 12y ago
    I figured as much, but never hurts to ask :) Thanks very much!
hnriot 12y ago
advertising does more than sell things directly, brand recognition is another big purpose.
- andrewbinstock 12y ago
  True. However, brand recognition ads occur more in the consumer space than in technical market. Especially in a market of mostly small vendors, they're trying to sell, rather than establish a perception of the brand.

fidotron 12y ago

The view I've seen chucked round a lot is that social ads (i.e. Facebook) are much more effective than almost anything except a Google ad that is on a Google search results page. This is especially the case if you're trying to build awareness of a product a viewer would have no reason to otherwise search for in the first place. This point is likely to prove very contentious thanks to a critical mass of HNers with vested interest on either side.

hyperbovine 12y ago
Agreed; social ads are just a more refined version of banner ads. You can push ads at your target demographic until the cows come home, but ultimately the effectiveness of that strategy will be upper bounded by that of sending Shutterfly link to somebody who just Googled "photo prints". Anecdotally, the only ads I have ever clicked and not regretted it were served up by Google.
- kaybe 12y ago
  The ads I clicked and actually found a lot of value in were for small speciality stores on small specialized websites. The thing is, I never see most ads because I run ghostery and https everywhere (no adblock necessary, not sure which of the two does the job though). The ones I see are mostly the useful ones not served by a network.

VikingCoder 12y ago

Jeez, I'd be pretty happy with $1 million in revenue. I guess if that doesn't cover the expenses to create the kind of content that gets you $1 million in revenue, then the numbers are wrong, but I find that hard to believe.

andrewbinstock 12y ago
We paid our authors, columnists, and bloggers. And paid a staff of 2.5 full-time employees and a salesperson. Add benefits, insurance, rent, hosting costs, and taxes--and you're not looking at a lot of profit left over.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  That's the sad thing: you're saying that it still turns a net profit after paying all of its staff and costs, and yet that's apparently not enough to keep it running.
  - andrewbinstock 12y ago
    It will turn a minimal profit this year, but we could find no way to project a profit for next year or the year after.
    - rip747 12y ago
      Personally I would do like RailsCasts.com and ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com (now ChannelAwesome.com), two sites I frequent, did... offer pro accounts. Pro accounts could: 1) remove all advertising from the site. 2) have access to content early like drafts of upcoming articles 3) have access to revised or updates to articles 4) allow people to recommend articles the list could go on, you'll probably think of a thousand things that I couldn't since I'm not in marketing.
    - marincounty 12y ago
      At first, I was wondering why not just sell the business? Who knows, you might have tried? After thinking about it some more, since it's your baby--why take the chance of letting some with more money than taste/knowlege blow it up? I understand your decision to close it down. I hope you keep talking about the efficacy of Internet advertising--the real truth. I'll follow you on Twitter.

Morphling 12y ago

>Dr. Dobb's, we had close to $3 million in revenue, almost all of it from advertising Is that actual quote from the site? Since now it just says: "Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising" I'm just curious how they would manage to spend $3 MILLION in 4 years and how it wouldn't be profitable to run a website that was ONLY $1 million revenue. I've never even heard of the site until now, so I have no idea what they are doing, but it really seems odd that money was an issue if you are raking in millions.

B-Con 12y ago
It's mostly before my time, but they used to be a prominent tech journal, started in the late 70s and were fairly popular in the 90s. In my head I picture them as a small company, not just "some website". $1m in revenue doesn't make for a very large company. I'm curious how they morphed in size over time and what their expenses were.
- Morphling 12y ago
  As I said I have no idea what they did and maybe I'm just being naive, but $1 million per year seems like plenty to keep a website online.
  - dagw 12y ago
    $1 million per year is plenty to just keep a website online. It's not that much if you also want to pay people a decent wage to produce world class content to put on the site. I'm guessing the choices they faced was between a slow multi-year slide along: cut costs->lower quality content->less viewers->less money->cut costs... and simply seeing the writing on the wall and calling it quits before they hit rock bottom. I guess a third option would be to take The New Republic route and throw out everything the current audience loved about the magazine and try to create a new, entirely different product, with the same name but focusing a potentially more profitable market. But I respecting for not wanting to go that route either.
andrewbinstock 12y ago

e12e 12y ago

Considering the Veronica Mars movie[1] hit 5MUSD funding, I wonder what it would take for a subscriber-only Dr. Dobbs journal to hit 3M with the premier tier being a one year subscription? At 10 USD/month, that's 25 000 backers? [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project?ref=most_funded https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-... [Edit: I forgot a big thank you! I still remember reading the article on red-black trees in my teens. Took me many years to realize the significance - but we learn best by streching up, to that which is just out of reach.]